Blow Job Nation

How Fitting that the Nineties should end with visions of blow jobs. Whether any involved President Clinton or not, the blow job feels right--not weird, not prurient--as the defining emblem for these past ten years. It is sexual fast food. In lieu of deeper and more penetrating sex, sex that might heal you, it's quick and detached. So it seems right that the Gulf war, with its high-speed, video-game technology and curiously deflating outcome, was the classic conflict of the Blow Job Decade.

Of course, the Blow Job Decade was a direct response to the AIDS epidemic that plagued the Eighties, Death-through-sex had a logically chilling effect, which led to a newfound appreciation of extended foreplay.

According to an article in The New York Times, high school kids in the Nineties give or get blow jobs so regularly that many no longer even think of them as intimate. So it should come as no surprise that the White House doesn't think of a blow job as an act of infidelity.

It wasn't always thus. Until the late Sixties, blow jobs were the domain of prostitutes. No wife or girlfriend would perform such a lowly act. It was accepted that men went to prostitutes to get blow jobs.

A shift occurred in the late Sixties, thanks to the sexual revolution. Regular women started to give blow jobs, at least on special occasions such as birthdays. In the Seventies we thrilled to the decadence of blow jobs. In the Eighties men and women bought coke with them. Through most of the Nineties blow jobs often substituted for riskier penetration until, at last, at the end of the decade, they are nothing to us, not really sex, more like a peck on the cheek. How far we've come.

Looked at in terms of history then, if President Clinton did indeed beg a blow job or two at the end of the century, he has virtually done nothing at all. It is only to his fellow baby boomers, reared in the Fifties when blow jobs still held a certain novelty, that he is a rake. But as veterans of the sexual revolution, boomers have their own excesses to forgive and forget.

The O.J. Simpson trial, another pivotal drama of the Nineties, was more like a failed blow job--months of focused, determined slogging that in the end led to no satisfaction at all. The same thing has happened with Serbian war-crimes trials in the Hague. Both were reminiscent of those nights you don't want to remember.

Prozac, Jiffy Lube, Starbucks, cigar clubs, e-mail--the Nineties have definitely favored the quick fix with immediate results. If you think of a blow job as a rigid system of stimulation, done repetitively with only few variations in technique, that almost always produces instant gratification, then computers and Web sites are a natural pan of the blow job landscape.

The Blow Job Decade was a time of increasing political correctness, when date rape emerged as a hot-button issue, when Anita Hill muddied the waters and when Seventeen magazine was banned from a school library for being too salacious. Blow jobs have always been the virgin's last resort, a way of (concluded on page 136)Blow Job Nation(continued from page 119) getting off easy. What better sex act for uptight times?

The Nineties were also a period of gender switching. In ads Calvin Klein used Marky Mark in only underwear to appeal to straight men. Buff and vain gay men became role models, inspiring thousands of gym memberships. Regular guys stepped up their purchases of makeup, hair dye, designer clothes and plastic surgery. Traditional male symbols were feminized and even homosexualized. Cross-dressing went mainstream. Drag queens--the funny, nonthreatening kind--were all over the big screen. The Crying Game won an Oscar for non-comedic drag.

The Army, the last bastion of macho pigism, was forced to face up to its gay component. The househusband became a common and welcome sight on the nation's playgrounds. And, with the exception of the accusations of Clinton's acquaintances, the sex we heard most about in the Nineties was sadomasochistic (think Madonna and Mapplethorpe).

What cannot be denied about blow jobs is that they are relatively safe. Safety has been another hallmark of the Nineties. In this decade crime has dropped. Air bags save lives. Pepper spray makes you feel secure. In 1998 women are safer from sex offenders on the nation's streets than they may be in the Oval Office.

Let's say, for the moment, that whatever went on in the White House was consensual. Why would Clinton be the lucky recipient of the decade's favorite pastime? One thing is clear: Women like him and they sense he likes them. No matter what he is accused of, there is ample evidence to suggest he's a consummate flirt. If he's interested in a woman, he calls her 12 times a day, gives presents and is physically affectionate and kind to her. He is a man who clearly adores his daughter, and who actually mentioned the words "child care subsidy" before he was distracted by Kenneth Starr.

He is a man so accessible to women that he has caused a fracture in the feminist ranks. Patricia Ireland of NOW says he could be guilty of "sexual assault," while Gloria Steinem can't find evidence even of harassment. New Yorker editor Tina Brown, having met him, found him disarmingly sexy and said so in print. He is the first president ever to cause an intellectual girls' catfight.

Of course, blow jobs have nothing to do with truth. In slang parlance, to blow means to butter up, to flatter. There's no point in whining about truth in the Blow Job Decade.

Because blow jobs are so transient and can be lied about, they are easily part of rumor and innuendo. The presidential involvement would seem to endow the blow job with a loftier purpose, but whether you place it in the Oval Office, or tie a designer scarf on it, it retains the spurt of commonality, and that's what makes it sexy.

We have only another year and a half of the Blow Job Decade, of this national porn movie whose climax was, evidently, America discussing whether to impeach a president for lying about blow jobs.

In the next ten years, let's hope we can look forward to some pithier times--a decade of greater depth guided by a president who's far more penetrating.